The British Council delivered a three-day workshop starting from 24 September to orient four local materials writers to write for the second, consolidation phase of the EDGE project. This project develops English, digital and social awareness skills to adolescent girls from the underprivileged village communities from India, Bangladesh and Nepal, who meet in after school clubs, facilitated by peer leaders. The writers are writing stories, written and listening texts, speaking activities, games and other content to be presented in a series of magazine issues.
The workshop covered the context, the needs and interests of the South Asian club members, the syllabus for English, digital and social awareness skills, features of different genres for the magazines, principles of scaffolding activity sequences, language grading, devising instructions that might be understandable for CEF A1 level learners without the support of a teacher, and a session on writing stories connected to social awareness themes. On the third day, writers drafted texts for the magazine and evaluated each others’ work.